No Day But Today
by Rebel-Angel-Hero
Summary: Nine friends. One extraordinary year. A story of love, hope, struggle, and triumph.  Rated T for language and drugs.


**Here it is: Fruits Basket to the plot of Rent. Why? Because it had to be done. Jonathan Larson will roll in his grave, bless his soul for coming up with this fantastic musical.**

**By the way, I'm still writing _Opposites Attract_, just so you know. This is something for me to do while I work my way past my writer's block.**

**I'll let you figure out who from _Fruits Basket_ translates to who in _Rent_. :D**

* * *

Chapter One: Rent

_December 24, 9:00 p.m., Eastern Standard Time._

_From here on in, I shoot without a script. See if anything comes of it…instead of my old shit._

Yuki Sohma sighed as he filmed a man in a car yell irritably at a homeless man. That scene having passed, he mounted his camera onto his bike and rode off through the streets of New York City, seeing- and filming- what he could. The streets were busier than usual- which, in New York, was saying something- because it was Christmas Eve. In this particular area of the city, there were homeless people abound, and practically everywhere he looked, there were eviction notices for the many who could no longer pay their rent.

"How do you document real life when real life is getting more like fiction each day?" he muttered to himself as he rode through the streets to the tune of blaring horns. When he reached his apartment building in the East Village, he ripped off one of the numerous eviction notices from the door, hoisted his bike onto his shoulder, and began making his way up the stairs.

Just as he opened the door, the power in their flat went out. A shape rose out of the darkness and ran to the wall where the power box was. The sounds of fiddling with switches and wires accompanied a few sparks that briefly illuminated the face of Yuki's roommate and friend, Kyou. Yuki walked over and wordlessly handed the eviction notices to Kyou, who looked at them with a mixture of shock and anger.

The phone rang just then. Yuki ran over to pick it up. "Hello?" he said.

"Hey, guess who's back in town," a voice on the other end answered. "It's Haru, man, throw down the keys."

Yuki hung up and went to the window. On the street below stood a man with shockingly contrasting black and white hair.

"Hey!" Yuki called, to get his attention, then threw down the keys to the apartment. Hatsuharu Sohma bent down to pick them up from where they'd landed on the street.

"Got a light, man?" a man asked, walking up to Haru. Haru reached inside his coat for a lighter, but one of the man's companions tried to hit Haru and push him to the ground.

"Gimme that shit!" another said as all three fell onto Haru, who pushed through them and ran away into an alley.

"Get that son of a bitch!" one called as the three gave chase. They caught up to Haru and threw him to the ground, beating on him and taking his coat.

Inside the apartment, Kyou had lit some candles to gain back light, then dragged over a metal trash can. "What've we got to light?" he asked Yuki, pulling down a few posters from the walls.

In answer, Yuki brought over some various papers and what looked to be like screenplays. They pulled down the canvas covering the flue, and Yuki pulled out a lighter, setting the mass of papers ablaze.

Yuki went back over to the window, looking for their third companion, who should have been there by then. "Where is he?" he wondered aloud, turning back in to the relative warmth of the apartment.

"How are we going to pay?" he asked after a few minutes. Kyou looked up from the blaze in the trash can.

"How are we going to pay last year's rent?" he repeated, knowing that someone had to pose the question. Kyou didn't answer, knowing what they both knew- neither of them had the money, or could come up with the money in enough time.

They both went to the window to look once again for Haru, only to find that many of the tenants on the block had apparently had the same idea as them, and were dropping burning eviction notices into the air. They ran back in, threw a few more things into the fire, then grabbed the trash can, brought it to the balcony, and overturned it, letting the burning pages fall to the street.

A black SUV drove up the street and parked roughly in the middle. Several tenants came towards it and were almost mobbing it. The driver got out, revealing himself to be Kureno Sohma, the landlord of the entire block- and Kyou, Yuki, and Haru's ex-roommate. The tenants were yelling at Kureno, and he ran his fingers through his hair. "Draw a line in the sand, and then make a stand," he told them, though more towards Kyou and Yuki.

"Use your camera to spar," Kyou suggested jokingly.

"Use your guitar!" Yuki countered.

Most of the tenants, both on the street and at the balconies of their apartments, began chanting, "We're not gonna pay! We're not gonna pay! Last year's rent, this year's rent, next year's rent!"

As the burning papers fell down to the ground, the chanting descended into incoherent shouting, then faded away as the tenants trickled back into their apartments.

Kureno turned around to find a man leaning against his car. "Hey, bum," he said, "get your ass off the Range Rover." The homeless man slapped a hand against the car, flipped Kureno the bird, and walked off.

"You know, Kureno, that attitude towards the homeless is the exact kind of thing that Kagura is protesting," Yuki called down.

"Kagura is protesting losing her performance space," Kureno corrected him, "not my attitude. Come down here, I want to talk to you guys."

With a disgusted look, Yuki went back inside. Kyou looked over the railing to the balcony below theirs; in the apartment below, a pretty young woman was similarly looking up at him, smoking a cigarette. Her brown hair was artfully mussed up, and her brown eyes watched him with a mix of curiosity and mischievousness. With a smile, she turned and went back inside of her own apartment.

* * *

Kureno pulled the Range Rover over to the side of the street. As he opened the door and got out, he had to make sure to avoid the various fires that littered the street.

"Close up: Kureno Sohma, our ex-roommate, who married Arisa Uotani, of the Westport Uotanis," Yuki narrated as he filmed Kureno tear down posters from the walls of the apartment buildings. "His father-in-law bought several buildings on the block and a nearby vacant lot, home to Tent City. Kureno hopes to evict all the homeless from Tent City and build a cyber studio."

"Kyou," Kureno said, pointedly avoiding Yuki's comments. "You're looking good for a guy who's coming off of a year of withdrawal."

Kyou didn't smile as he hopped onto the hood of the Range Rover. "What do you want, Kureno?" he asked, not without a note of hostility in his voice.

"What do I want? Well, my investor-"

"You mean your father-in-law?" Yuki interrupted.

"-read about Kagura's performance in the Village Voice, got pissed, and sent me down here to collect the rent."

"What rent?" Yuki demanded.

"This past year's rent, which I let slide."

"Let slide? You said we were golden."

"When you bought the building," Kyou interjected.

"When we were roommates?" Yuki added pointedly. "Remember, you lived here?"

"Yeah, how could I forget," Kureno said, slightly sarcastically. "You, me, Arisa, Haru, and Kagura." He ripped down another one of Kagura's posters. "How is the drama queen?"

"She's getting ready for her performance," Yuki told him, trying and failing to sound off-hand.

"I know. Still her production manager?"

"Not exactly," Yuki said evasively.

"Still dating her?"

Yuki sighed. "I was dumped."

"She got a new man?"

"Well, no."

"What's his name?"

"Saki," Yuki and Kyou said together.

Kureno took a second, but once he realized what they meant, laughed hard at that. Yuki rolled his eyes. "Thanks for being so understanding," he said sarcastically.

"You expect sympathy from the guy who shut off our power?" Kyou pointed out. "On Christmas Eve?"

"Got your attention, didn't it?" Kureno said, still chuckling.

"Happy birthday, Jesus," Kyou said sarcastically.

"The rent?" Kureno asked as he tossed the wad of posters at Kyou, who threw it onto the Range Rover.

"You're wasting your time," Yuki told him.

"We're broke," Kyou said.

"And you broke your word," Yuki added.

"There is one way you won't have to pay," Kureno told them.

"I knew it," Kyou muttered.

"Next door will become the home of CyberArts," Kureno began, "and now that the block is rezoned, our dream can become a reality." The lack of enthusiasm in either didn't serve to deter him.

"You'll see, boys," he promised them. "A state of the art, digital, virtual, interactive studio. I'll forgo your rent, and on paper guarantee that you can stay here for free- if you do me one small favor."

"What?" Yuki asked.

"Convince Kagura to cancel her protest."

"Why not just get an injunction, or call the cops?"

"Yeah, I did, and they're on standby. But my investors would rather I handled this quietly."

"You can't quietly wipe out an entire tent city and then watch _It's a Wonderful Life_ on TV!" Kyou said indignantly.

"You want to produce films and write songs?" Kureno asked them frankly. "You need somewhere to do it! It's what we used to dream about- think twice before you pooh-pooh it.

"You'll see the beauty of a studio that lets us do our work and get paid, with condos on the top whose rent keeps open our shop. Just stop the protest, and you'll have it made! You'll see. Or you'll pack." He walked over to the Range Rover, got in, and drove off.

* * *

**Well, I hope that wasn't too horrible. It's a long and crack-filled process as to how I got here, but I'm actually kind of excited about this. You'll probably notice that a lot of the singing in the movie/musical is going to be turned into dialogue. A rough estimate is that probably about half of the songs from the movie (that's what I'm going off of, since I've lamentably never seen the musical) are going to be turned into dialogue. Please don't yell at me because of that. Again, I say: do you know how hard it is to write a musical fanfiction? I'm having enough trouble as it is deciding which songs should stay songs and which should be converted to dialogue, how to write the dialogue so that it makes sense, where to fit in the songs so that they make sense, etcetera, etcetera.**

**As always, please read and review. I'm starting to get the hang of this fanfiction thing! (Kidding. I've been writing for a long time.)**

**Cheers.**

**~Rebel-Angel-Hero**


End file.
